Framing and the Media Field: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News Stories on the Internet Giant Alibaba in China

Abstract

Anti-monopoly has been one of China’s most crucial policy shifts in recent years, exerting a major influence on internet giants. The anti-monopoly investigation into Alibaba in 2020 is an example. The purpose of this study is to uncover the frames used in news stories about the event and to identify the factors influencing the news production. Critical discourse analysis is conducted by analyzing news stories extracted from two influential media in China, People's Daily and Caixin, from a perspective that considers both texts and social contexts. The findings reveal that news stories from People's Daily and Caixin are considerably different in genre, register, and discourse, thus developing different interpretations, i.e., frames, of the same event. The study determines three agents involved in news production and employs the media field as a framework to examine their relations and interactions: the state’s official discourse is internalized by media, while media use symbolic power to construct the audience’s perception of persons or things in reality. Moreover, by classifying the top 30 comments on two media's posts on Weibo (a twitter-like social media), the study demonstrates that audiences actively reinterpret and reconstruct the news discourse, borrowing power from the state and media to resist internet giants.